Speaking one’s mother tongue, be it Latvian, Hungarian, or Portuguese, must not become a social or economic disadvantage in the networked European information society of the twenty-first century. Many European languages run the risk of becoming victims of the digital age, as they are under-represented and under-resourced. Huge regional market opportunities remain untapped because of language barriers.

The Workshop aims at bringing various groups together who are concerned with the broad topic of "Language Technology for a multilingual Europe". This encompasses on the one hand representatives from research and development in the field of language technologies, on the other hand users from quite divers areas. Two examples of the application of language technology is (automatic / machine) translation, and processing of texts from the humanities with methods from language technology, like automatic topic indexing, text mining, integrating numerous texts and additional information across languages etc.

These kinds of application areas and research and development in language technology have in common that they rely on resources (lexica, corpora, grammars, ontologies etc.), or that they produce these resources. A multilingual Europe, being supported by language technology, is only possible if an adequate, interoperable infrastructure of resources, including the related tooling, is available for all European languages. In addition it is necessary that the aforementioned and other communities of developers and users of language technology stand as one, homogenous community. Only in this way it will be possible to assure the long-term political acceptance of the topic "language technology" in Europe.

The workshop is co-organised by two GSCL working groups ("Text Technology" and "Machine Translation") and META-NET. META-NET, a Network of Excellence consisting of 44 research centres from 31 countries, is dedicated to building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society. META-NET is forging META, the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance.

Together with Aljoscha Burchardt and Felix Sasaki we wrote an article on META-NET that was published in LIBREAS – Library Ideas, Das mehrsprachige Europa: eine Herausforderung für die Sprachtechnologie. The article is written in German but of course you can use one of the freely available high-quality Machine Translation engines integrated into your browser and operating system of choice to translate it into any other language instantly.*